The escalating violence in Ambon and Sulawesi since the fall of Soeharto has led to communities torn apart, with neighbour killing neighbour. Louise Williams reports. AT first Ali was surprised and confused when he saw the faces of his old friends among the mob sweeping down on his suburb, swinging their machetes and lobbing Molotov cocktails into the modest wooden cottages to burn him and his neighbours out.
Then he was terrified, and gathered up his Muslim family and ran, abandoning a lifetime of friendship with his Christian neighbours with only the clothes on his back.
"It was our old friends, our good friends," he says, shaking his head, on the porch of a small mosque where he is camping in the riot-wracked Indonesian city of Ambon. The streets outside are virtually deserted, except for patrolling troops. Entire blocks of shops have been burnt to the ground and the rest of the commercial district lies silent and shuttered.
After three months of street warfare between Christian and Muslim gangs, Ambon is under military control. The local television station is still broadcasting the news against the old, idyllic backdrop of the white sand beaches and swaying palm trees of this beautiful, remote tropical island.
But the message from the local military command is harsh: no more than three people may gather on the street, mosques and churches will be raided for weapons and those who want to keep the battle going will be shot dead.
Already at least 200 people have died in Ambon, hundreds have been injured and tens of thousands have fled. This week the military was dividing up the city: some roads for Christian-driven buses, some roads for the Muslims.
In Ujung Pandang, on neighbouring Sulawesi, where many of the Muslims from Ambon have sought shelter, angry mobs of Islamic students marched at the weekend on a Christian meeting hall and hurled Molotov cocktails through the windows in revenge for Ambon. The Catholic cathedral stood ringed by troops following a similar attack last week.
In West Kalimantan, another terrible ethnic battle was raging along the narrow rural roads which wind up the coastal flats towards the Malaysian border. The victors paraded the heads of their victims through the town and the outnumbered troops did little more than man roadblocks to try to prevent those armed with long, sharp harvesting knives from passing.
In majority Catholic East Timor, thousands of migrant Muslims were boarding boats to get out, just as thousands did in West Timor last year when the Muslim minority was burnt out of town.
The spectre of neighbour killing neighbour in multi-racial, multi-ethnic Indonesia is perhaps the most frightening development since the fall of the Soeharto regime.
"More than any other communal incident that has taken place around Indonesia, the civil war in Ambon has ripped apart the notion of Indonesia as a tolerant society of all faiths," wrote Sidney Jones, an Indonesia specialist and director of the US-based Human Rights Watch, in a recent report.
"The situation is very delicate," said moderate Muslim leader Mr Abdurrham Wahid, who heads the 40 million-strong Nahdlatul Ulama.
"We tolerated a very big gap between different ethnic and religious groups, an economic gap, a cultural gap and an education gap, so there is rivalry and competition which can be used to entice people to rebel." But for Mr Wahid, the explosion of violence is not just an expression of the gap between the haves and the have-nots, the locals and the outsiders, but a deliberate and monstrous manipulation of the uneducated and poor for political gain before the June 7 national elections, the first democratic polls since 1955.
Riots are being provoked by the old guard, those who lost their power and privilege with the fall of the Soeharto regime in May last year, and those determined to prevent the elections from going ahead, he says.
"The central Government is weak, the military is demoralised, that is correct. But, there is a deliberate political campaign to destabilise the nation. If the riots in Ambon are brought under control then they will move elsewhere, like in Kalimantan. According to my intelligence there are four target locations on Java alone," he says.
So delicate is the balance between Indonesia's majority Muslims and the myriad minority ethnic and religious communities that disputes and political campaigns based on race or religion were taboo under the Soeharto government. The Soeharto regime maintained stability with military repression.
Prominent sociologist Mr Loekman Sustrisno often likened Indonesian society to a "pressure cooker", with all the tensions and grievances building for more than three decades beneath the lid.
Under Soeharto, the government followed a controversial program of transmigration. The main island of Java, with its strong Muslim identity, was seriously overcrowded and so millions were assisted to migrate to the "empty" outer islands to the east and north. According to official statistics, about 9 million people have been moved off Java, Bali, Madura and several smaller islands nearby since 1950, and with their descendants total about 15 million people - 8 per cent of the population.
In many cases the indigenous people of the outer islands were tribal people, converted to Christianity under Dutch colonialism. But they maintained simple, shifting agricultural lifestyles. Many indigenous people were unable to compete with the better educated, more worldly Muslim migrants who took control of trade and much of the land.
In West Kalimantan, one of the most isolated people on earth, the Dayak "head hunting" tribes of the towering Borneo rainforests, were dragged out of the jungle and left on the edges of the scruffy rural towns as the forests were felled and two-hectare lots given away to Muslim settlers.
To the Dayaks the land was life and belonged to all, every tree and every rock harbouring a spirit to respect. Their lifestyle of shifting cultivation which gave every hectare of land 10 years to regrow was challenged by the bulldozers and government policies to permanently settle the "primitive people".
Those who came to build the first roads to let the transmigrants in were the hot-tempered, staunchly Muslim people of the harsh, dry island of Madura, just east of Java. It was the heads of Maduranese that the Dayaks sought when they returned to head-hunting two years ago for the first time since the turn of the century, and it was Maduranese heads that were paraded at the weekend. To the Dayak, to take the head of an enemy is to take and gain his strength.
In Ambon much of the migration was voluntary. As the Indonesian economy grew steadily, new opportunities were opening up. The Bugis, Buton and Makassar ethnic groups of Sulawesi, all staunchly Muslim and traditionally mobile seafarers, moved to Ambon and other Christian majority cities such as Dili in East Timor and Kupang in West Timor, where they grabbed a large slice of trade.
In the religious and ethnic complexities of modern Indonesia the potential for disputes lies within virtually every local community. Now the lid is off, and the expanding economy has collapsed, leaving the mobs to squabble over the shrinking cake. In the 10 months since the President, Dr B.J. Habibie, came to power, 180 police stations have been burnt down, at least five trains are reportedly attacked each day by frustrated mobs, schoolchildren as young as 12 fight pitched battles on the streets of Jakarta and Muslims have lynched Christians, and Christians have lynched Muslims.
It is difficult to exaggerate the danger of ethnic and religious violence spreading. "If the violence in Ambon does not stop, other regions will burn. If you do not follow our orders we will shoot you," said the military's televised message to the 330,000 residents of the city.
There are terrible stories on both sides and truth is mingling with myths. Both sides stand accused of slicing babies from the bellies of mothers, of chopping off their victims' limbs in battle, of hanging innocent young women in trees, of tying their neighbours up in sacks and dropping them into the magnificent harbour. Some of the stories are true.
"I don't know how it became a religious war," says Mrs Frida Mataheru, sitting on a church pew in her pyjamas. "I heard that it was only meant to scare the BBM (Bugis, Buton, Makassar) people away from here." Like all the other Christians who tell the tale, she and her neighbours ran from marauding, armed Muslim gangs, and now their homes have gone and all their possessions, too.
At the small mosque by the port, the crowd is getting agitated as, one by one, the people tell their own terrible stories of marauding Christians.
The Ambonese, the indigenous Christian people, are "orang bodoh" – stupid people – one woman ventures. The Christian Ambonese, they say, just want to do easy office jobs, get drunk and have parties. They are lazy and stupid, say the Muslims who once claimed to be their good neighbours.
And, so the story is out, the eager newcomers versus the calm, slow cycle of life on a remote tropical island.
But what really tipped the scales in Ambon, says Human Rights Commissioner Mr Marzuki Darusman, was the appointment of a Muslim governor and vice-governor two years ago, under the Soeharto regime's efforts to Islamicise the bureaucracy to reflect Indonesia's status as a majority Muslim nation.
"The Muslim groups are mostly in trade and transport and this meant the local Ambonese were marginalised because the migrants were more cohesive and had certain socio-economic skills. So the Ambonese were trying to hold out in the bureaucracy and then the central Government put Muslims in control, so they lost again." In the local hospital two young men, with the yellow skin of the ill, are nursing wounds after being shot by the miltitary. The room stinks of disinfectant, sweat and the sour breath of the sick.
"If the military leave it will start up again for sure. I am ready to fight for my religion. The Christians think Ambon belongs to them and they want to get rid of the Muslims because they control the economy, but we work harder and we are more advanced," says 21-year-old Suhardi.
"In the end Ambon must be one or the other – Christian or Muslim. We can't have both religions any more," he says of his port town, once the capital of the magnificent Spice Islands, a meeting place for traders of all races and religions.